


l'shana haba'ah b'yerushalayim

by MissjuliaMiriam



Series: Jewish Juno [2]
Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Found Family, Holidays, Jewish Buddy Aurinko, Jewish Juno Steel, Passover, this is just soft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-12
Updated: 2019-06-12
Packaged: 2020-05-01 18:50:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19183630
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissjuliaMiriam/pseuds/MissjuliaMiriam
Summary: “Next year in Jerusalem,” he mutters to himself, looking down at the globe, and thinks: yeah, okay.Or: Juno and the Crime Crew celebrate Passover.





	l'shana haba'ah b'yerushalayim

**Author's Note:**

> I'm back on my Jewish Juno bullshit and feeling Real Soft about it.
> 
> As usual, this is EXTREMELY self-indulgent. I started writing it around Actual Passover but was super busy, so I sort of stopped? And now I managed to finish it! Well, "managed" - it was originally going to be a lot longer, and then I decided NOT to hash out every damn detail of the Passover ritual. Though. I definitely COULD have. I restrained myself.
> 
> For any/all curious goyim, I included a few cultural notes in the end notes! Otherwise, read and enjoy :D

Juno loses track of the calendar in space. It’s not hard to do; time is pretty fake when you’re warmed by a different sun every time you turn your face to it. Days come and go, time passes… and then one morning Buddy throws an egg at his head while he’s halfway through drinking a cup of coffee.

Ten minutes, a lot of yelling, and a half-mug’s worth of spilled coffee later, Juno says, “But seriously, what the fuck, Buddy?”

“You were supposed to catch it, dumbass,” she says. “That was our last egg—now you’re gonna have to go buy eggs _and_ a lamb bone.”

“A… lamb bone?” Juno says, bewildered, and then he glances at the calendar tacked up on the wall in the galley kitchen. It’s a Hebrew calendar, which makes it even harder to keep track of any sort of sane passage of time, but it _does_ very clearly show the month of Nisan, and he counts back the days quickly in his head, then says, “Oh.”

It’s the 12th of Nisan. The 15th is the first night of Passover—so, yeah, lamb bone.

“Buy your own damn lamb bone!” Juno retorts, once he’s figured that out.

“Nope,” Buddy says. “I’m staying here and cleaning all of _your_ secretary’s cracker crumbs out of every corner of this cursed ship. _You_ have to go find the damn lamb bone. And eggs. Because you dropped that one.” She points at the egg splattered all over the floor, as if to illustrate.

“She’s _our_ secretary now,” Juno insists, as he has every time someone tries to blame Rita on him since they joined Buddy’s crew. Trying to argue instead that it was in fact _Buddy_ that dropped the egg, because she _threw it at his head_ , is sure to be a failure. “You wanted her more than me, damn it! But fine, I’ll find you a fucking kosher lamb bone on—what planet are we even _on_ right now?”

“Earth, moron.”

“Oh,” Juno says again. Well, that’ll make it a bit easier—not that Jews haven’t managed to carve out of a corner of every planet in the solar system, but there’s definitely more on Earth and near it than in more outlying regions. Makes most of the ritual shit easier.

“Yeah.” Buddy smirks at him a bit, then she waves and says, “You might as well go now—we’ll be the whole next three days clearing out all the _chametz_ , and I’m going to make Rita and Vespa help. Your pick of Peter or Jet for who to go to the market.”

Juno considers that for a moment, tries to imagine Peter actually _helping_ the _chametz_ hunt and not being anguished by the decimation of his own snack hoard, and then says, “Yeah, I’ll take Peter.”

“That seems wise,” Buddy says, but she’s still smirking. She has to know about the snack hoard—Buddy knows everything that happens on this ship—but she’s also the worst. “Good luck! And pick up some extra matzah for your two.”

Juno rolls his eyes— _his two_ , honestly, just because he knew them first—but he goes. Peter’s easy to find, at least, lounging in their shared room in what should be a deeply uncomfortable position with an e-reader propped in front of his face; the door is open, but Juno taps on the wall anyway, catching his lover’s attention.

“Juno!” Peter says, delighted, and rolls over to beam at him. Every time, Juno feels his own little flare of disbelieving joy at how unironically _happy_ Peter always is to see him. It’s unreal. “What brings you to my humble abode?”

“Shopping,” Juno says. “Buddy needs me to go get a lamb bone. And matzah. Oh, and eggs, because she threw the last one at my head.”

“She… right,” Peter says. He gets up off the bed, throwing the e-reader down onto the mattress behind him, and comes over to kiss Juno’s cheek. “Shopping sounds fun!”

“And it means you get to dodge the insane cleaning frenzy,” Juno says, beginning the walk through the halls of the ship toward the bay doors. They’re docked at an orbital spaceport, so they’ll have to take a shuttle down to the surface. And of course, the spaceport is a madhouse, so Juno and Peter sit close together and talk quietly for an hour waiting for a shuttle down to the surface, and a somewhat more reasonable fifteen minutes after that to get a second shuttle across to the Tel Aviv airspace hub. Easiest place to find kosher foods, Juno had reasoned to Peter, never mind that in his heart of hearts it was just that it felt like the thing to do to go visit the land of his most ancient ancestors… or whatever. He forces himself not to think about it too much; they’re only going to be there for an hour.

It ends up being a little more than an hour. The markets in Tel Aviv are fascinating, and Peter gets distracted repeatedly by shining _hamsas_ and stars of David on silver chains, tokens with Hebrew lettering or Trees of Life, all sorts of artifacts of Juno’s culture, and he buys himself a few small things, including a set of filigree Tree of Life earrings; Juno refuses to admit that he’s just as attracted, but does allow Peter to buy him a particularly beautiful _hamsa_ and, on a whim, makes his own purchase of a _mezuzah_ for the doorway to his and Peter’s room, haggling aggressively over the price until Peter is staring with wide-eyed awe and the merchant is sufficiently impressed as to shake his hand in respect when they’ve struck a deal. Eventually they wind their way through to where food stalls are selling all of what anyone could ask for for their seder plate. Juno picks out a lamb shank to cook for dinner tonight and then clear for its bone, and a box of eggs, a bunch of parsley, a head of romaine, a horseradish root, a few leeks, a bag of oranges, and a container of olives, and then, because he can’t recall whether they had the ingredients for _charoset_ already, all of those things as well. Then he adds _two_ boxes of matzah, because Buddy’s an idiot if she thinks that a single extra box will be enough for Peter _and_ Rita’s snacking habits.

Finally, with the shopping more or less done, Juno is able to step back and survey his bounty. And it _is_ a bounty, really—good things to eat and fresh herbs to smell; he pulls out a single sprig of parsley and sticks it between his teeth to chew on, because parsley tastes like Passover tastes like spring. Peter smiles when he kisses the taste out of Juno’s mouth and says, “Shall we go back then, my dear?”

“Yeah, sure thing,” Juno replies, smiling back. 

They do—it takes some waiting around in the spaceport again, but both of them are sun-warm and in a good mood, and they make small talk while they wait. Peter wanders off for a while and comes back with a paperback thriller novel; Juno chews another small sprig of parsley, just because he can. Then their shuttle arrives and they’re on their way back to the spacedock and their floating home, which is hopefully at least partially divested of _chametz_.

The next few days are a bit of a whirlwind. Cooking and cleaning and preparing the ship for Pesach… it’s fun. Juno’d forgotten, really, how much fun the lead-up to Passover could be. He has only the vaguest memories of doing this in his earliest childhood, when things had been good—not that they’d made much of a big deal of the holiday even then, because they’d only been a family of three, and it’s hard to do the seder right with only one adult. But the hunt for _chametz_ had always happened, and his mother had often spent the week singing Passover songs and telling them the Exodus story at bedtime. After Takano, well, it had been harder, but they’d still done at least some of it. The holidays were Juno’s closest connection to his heritage—they’d never gone to the Oldtown synagogue, really, but Passover and Hanukkah and fasting for Yom Kippur had made up his religious upbringing, such as it was.

He’d let a lot go over the years. Food, especially kosher items, cost money, and friends to celebrate with had been even harder to come by. So he just… hadn’t. But now he has a home, a family, more of a community than he’d ever had, and the added benefit of Buddy also being Jewish… well. It’s easy to remember the love he’d once had for the little rituals of Pesach.

And then the day arrives. Juno rolls up his sleeves and spends the morning and early afternoon in the kitchen with Jet, Buddy shouting orders from the galley’s dining area, Juno and Jet mostly ignoring her. Rita is… somewhere, doing something, and Peter is with Vespa planetside, picking up the makeshift _haggadah_ that Juno and Buddy had thrown together from the printer’s, and probably committing some sort of petty theft, knowing them; Juno is planning to pointedly Not Ask if they come home with any new valuables.

Somewhat to his surprise, Peter and Vespa return only with legitimately-acquired goods, including a tin of silver polish, apparently at Buddy’s request. She snags the small plastic pot from their tote bag and goes to buff some of the tarnish off of her seder plate; Rita appears from wherever she’d been and begins setting the table. It’s a little early yet, dinner not quite done yet, but they’ve got an hour or so of ritual to get through, after all, and it’s winding close to sundown.

Juno finds himself lingering near the round kitchen window, looking down at the earth as the shadow of night creeps over the globe, one day passing into the next. Soon the sun will sink completely out of their view, and they’ll be in the shade too, and it’ll officially be the first night of Passover. It’ll be the first time in years that he celebrates the holiday, and maybe the first time _ever_ that he really feels like he understands it. He’s seen and done a lot in the last year. Passed through a few narrow places of his own, _been_ passed over himself by one or two of his personal Angels of Death. And now… well, the desert is behind him in the literal sense, but in the figurative sense, he feels like maybe he can see, somewhere on the distant horizon, his own land of milk and honey. Things aren’t perfect, of course not, but… he’s found his people, and he’s _free_.

“Next year in Jerusalem,” he mutters to himself, looking down at the globe, and thinks: yeah, okay.

From behind him, someone winds their arms around his waist, and Juno leans back instinctively into Peter’s chest, breathing in the familiar smell of his cologne.

“Silver dollar for your thoughts, darling?”

“Isn’t it supposed to be a penny?” Juno replies, amused.

“Your thoughts are worth much more to me than a _penny_ ,” Peter says. 

Juno snorts. “If you say so, Peter. Just… watching the sunset, I guess.”

“It’s almost time.”

“Yeah.”

“Excited?”

Juno turns in Peter’s arms, looking away from the window to smile softly up at his lover’s face. “Yeah, actually. This’ll be good, I think.”

Peter hums happily and bends to place a small kiss on Juno’s nose. “I’m happy for you.”

“Sap.”

“Always, for you.”

Juno ducks his head—they’ve been together a while, but Peter’s unashamed _softness_ around him still just… _gets_ him sometimes. He really doesn’t understand how the man does it, but it’s so valuable. So precious.

“Hey, lovebirds!” Buddy calls from the dining area. “Sun’s going down! Candles!”

Juno sighs, rolls his eyes, and looks up again, just in time to receive another kiss from Peter. When their lips part, he says, “Better go, or she’s gonna throw another damn egg at me.”

Peter laughs, but does pull away, his hands lingering for just a moment before he lets go entirely and precedes Juno into the dining area. The table has been set, Juno sees—dishes and cloth napkins and small plates of snack food, as well as a two-pronged Shabbat candelabra in the centre of the table, the matzah in its cloth pocket, and the seder plate, now polished and set with its various items: springs of parsley, a leaf of lettuce and a chunk of horseradish, a leek, the roasted egg, the lamb bone, a scoop of _charoset,_ an olive, and an orange, set brightly colourful and proud in the middle of all the rest.

“Looks good,” Juno says to Buddy, and she smiles more genuinely than he’s maybe ever seen.

“Not the worst job I’ve done,” she replies. “Now hurry up, schmucks, we’ve got some Pesach to get done.”

There’s not much _hurrying_ to be done with the Passover ritual, Juno considers pointing out, but he gets it: he’s eager too. So he stops dawdling and joins Buddy, Jet, Vespa, and Rita at the table, Peter beside him, and sits down, reaching for the _haggadah_ to begin the evening.

**Author's Note:**

> And then Juno got drunk on space Manishewitz and taught Rita "Dayenu", and none of them ever knew peace again, the end.
> 
> In all seriousness, I could have gone on for like another 10k hashing out all of my feelings about the Themes re: s2 Juniverse and the Exodus story, but I sort of... already did that in [this giant meta bullet-point essay.](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XCYdAF-XDCUiATdZx-B5yJeirZFFeCasEVkjNcXz5jM) So instead I just wrote this small fic to complete the "Juno Steel is thematically Moses and I will die on this hill" exorcism.
> 
> ANYWAY. Cultural notes, as promised. 1: I use "Pesach" and "Passover" pretty interchangably in this fic, which is fine, I'm just Like That, they mean the same thing. (It's pronounced PAY-sahck, sort of. Hebrew, why are you like this.) 2: The title means "next year in Jerusalem", which is traditionally the last thing said during the seder (SAY-der), especially by diaspora Jews. 3: "Seder" means "order" and it's the ritual meal for Passover. 4: There's a symbolic meaning for all of the things on the seder plate, most of them being "spring/renewal" or "suffering/we're sad that we were slaves", but the ones that are most important to me personally are the olive, which represents a prayer for peace in the Middle East (which I would like to imagine, by Juno's time, is instead a prayer of gratitude for a peace long-achieved) and the orange, which stands for the inclusion of women, LGBTQ+ folks, and all others traditionally on the fringes in Judaism and in the ritual of Passover. 5: uh, idk? If you have any other questions, HMU in the comments!
> 
> As usual, I DO reply to comments and can always be easily contacted on Twitter @flippinnazguls if you have questions or just want to holler at me about Jewish Juno, because I could talk about this shit Forever. Next time... probably High Holy Days, because I've got some FEELINGS about the Abraham and Isaac story, and also about Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur for Juno And Friends in general. See y'all on the flipside! <3


End file.
